On a related note, I was using AbiWord to write a real paper for the first
time today. I have always hated red squiggles, but I was actually
impressed with the productivity that they added for me. However, I hate
seeing red squiggles under names or words not in the dictionary. So I
decided that the ideal implementation for me would display squiggles and
let me middle-click on a word to flag it as "ignore". It sounds like
making the squiggles ignore ignored words will be done soon. I'd be
willing to implement a middle-click or modifier_key-click on a word (for
Win32 and BeOS?) to ignore it if someone who understands the mouse
handling of the text area could tell me where to start and if/when AbiWord
has a mechanism for making the squiggle code ignore words it doesn't know
on the command from the user.

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Justin Bradford wrote:

> > You may want to confer with Justin before making your choice. Specifically, > > I'm not sure how he wants to turn off a single squiggle when you press the > > Ignore button in the dialog. > > I haven't dug through the squiggle code quite enough to know it's current> implementation, but I think a flag on the specific squiggle might work in> combination with a dirty-word squiggle updater. So, you ignore a specific> word, and it's corresponding squiggle's flag, bIgnore, gets set. When the> squiggle's are drawn, obviously this one is not. Likewise, when evaluating> the current context, this word is considered squiggleless. Then, when this> region is dirtied due to editing, it reevaluates whether the squiggle, and> clears this flag (if it's still misspelled, obviously). This would have> the effect of adding a space to an ignored word, then removing said space,> and the "new" word, while the same as the original, would now be> considered misspelled, and thus squiggled-- which is exactly how Word> works.> > Additionally, if I modified the dialog-based spell checking algorithm to> iterate through squiggles, rather than the whole document again, it gives> two additional benefits: 1) we don't have to look-up words again, they're> already marked, 2) if a squiggled word has bIgnore set, I'll just skip> over it, so that ignored words don't show up every time you spell check> (which is how Word workds).> > This implies always squiggling text in the background (but just not> always showing the squiggles).> > > Hmm. You mean they slow down editing to do the check, and then don't show > > the results except via that icon? (Sounds like strategy #2 above.)> > Yeah, with squiggles always around we could do things like status bar> icons/messages.> > > PS: This reminds me that we need to finish that old rewrite of the > > autospell code so that it just checks dirty words in response to editing, > > instead of doing the full destructive block-level recheck for each atomic > > edit. > > This is sort of key to everything I've suggested above. Also, while the> squiggle code is being updated, it might be worthwhile trying to figure> out how to not squiggle new words before they're finished being typed.> > Justin> > >